Taylor Swift pulls all her albums from ‘spurned boyfriend’ Spotify

Spotify stopped streaming Taylor Swift’s music at her request Monday, setting up a business struggle between the industry’s most popular artist and the leading purveyor of a new music distribution system. The music streaming service sounded like a spurned boyfriend in a statement announcing the split, saying Swift’s management told it to pull the music late last week. All of Swift’s songs are no longer available to Spotify’s 40 million users, even though her single “Shake It Off,” was the most-played song on Spotify last week.

We were both young when we first saw you, but now there’s more than 40 million of us who want you to stay, stay, stay. It’s a love story, baby. Just say yes.

Spotify, in a blog post confirming her departure

The decision means that a large number of fans will have only one option to hear “1989,” and that’s to buy it — which hundreds of thousands of people have already done. More than 700,000 people bought “1989” in the first two days it went on sale last week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That already exceeds the year’s biggest one-week seller, Coldplay’s “Ghost Stories,” which sold 383,000 copies in May. David Bakula, Nielsen music analyst, said Swift is on pace to challenge the 1.2 million copies she sold the first week her last album, “Red,” went on sale.

Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.

Taylor Swift, writing in the Wall Street Journal in July